“You’re within eye-shot, which naturally requires that I do what any man would do in my position. I’m looking.” His leonine gaze took a timeless stroll along my transparent undergarments, pausing on my throat, stroking my breasts and abdomen, and darkening on the apex of my thighs. “Although, most certainly, I’m not just any man. As your husband, it’s my privilege to explore you with more than my eyes.” He pulled in a long breath, flaring finely chiseled nostrils. “You’re the most strikingly beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

He was a rake. God only knew how many beautiful women he’d explored with more than just his eyes. I meant nothing to him.

“You disgrace the one person you vowed to love and call yourself a husband? A man?” I gave him a scathing look up and down. “I’m twice the man you are.”

“You won’t feel like a man in a moment when this distance between us starts to bore me.”

I gripped the edge of the desk, needing more than three meters of separation. “I feel naught for you.”

“The devil you don’t. I know you’re wet. That infernal ache between your thighs must be growing increasingly uncomfortable. I don’t see why we can’t commence with the part where I assuage that ache.”

A gentleman wouldn’t dare speak to a lady like that. But Priest had never censored his ill-bred language around me. Nor had he ever treated me like a craven fragile flower. The fact that he considered me his equal was one of the things I loved about him.

But it wasn’t enough.

“You’ll assuage nothing.” My body—lustful thing that it was—trembled in disagreement. “You’re a soulless bastard who keeps a wife on retainer while you chase something better. Two years later, you return to your backup plan, your second choice, and kiss her as if she’s the only one you ever wanted. But you kiss them all like that, don’t you? It’s no wonder you want to hurry this along. What, with women waiting for you in every port, all those opportunities are beckoning. If you fuck your wife tonight, you could be inside another wet, warm body by the morrow.”

“Wrong as usual.” His gray eyes iced over, his beautiful voice a steel blade. “You’re the only one. Second to none.”

“Hmm. Where have I heard that? Oh! I know. Right here in this cabin. The night you asked me to wed you.”

With all the hindsight of a woman scorned, I wanted to reach back through time and strangle the lovesick twat who said I do to the king of libertines. Had my mother been alive, she would’ve stopped me from making such a disgraceful mistake. Hell, my father wouldn’t have even allowed a man with Priest’s reputation anywhere near his daughter.